Televisions have become commonplace in homes throughout many countries and increasingly throughout the world. Viewing of television programming has traditionally taken the form of either “live” viewing (that is, viewing as the television program is being broadcast) or time delayed viewing. Video cassette recorders (VCRs) have been used for many years to record programs for delayed viewing. More recently, however, digital video recorders (DVRs) have become available that allow television programs to be stored digitally on a hard disk for delayed viewing.
DVRs have allowed some enhancements to be made to television program viewing, such as a pause feature to pause the playback of the television program while it is being broadcast (with the remainder of the program being stored to the hard disk for later viewing). However, these enhancements remain in the general category of time delayed viewing—the viewer is able to record and thus delay viewing of the remainder of the program until a later time.
In addition to viewing television programs, other media have been used to distribute programming. Video cassettes have been used for many years to distribute movies and other programming for playback in VCRs. Additionally, other media such as Digital Versatile Disks (DVDs) are becoming increasingly popular for distributing movies and other programming. While DVDs are typically capable of providing higher resolution images and higher quality audio than video cassettes, and allow for faster random accessing of portions of the programming, DVD players typically do not provide much more in the way of enhanced functionality than is available from VCRs.
Despite these advances in recording devices and audio/video storage technology, there remains a need to expand on the television viewing enhancements available to users. The invention described below addresses these needs, providing meta data enhanced television programming.